Why we should read Part 34

In _War and Peace_ Tolstoy meant to give us what is commonly known as an historical novel: on laying it down we feel, not that we have lived in an age long past side by side with Napoleon, or fought at Borodino, but that these characters have been transplanted to our own age, and that he is depicting men and women whom we already know very well. The poverty of his historical colouring is amazing: where he depicts reality, the "natural" man, his language is distinguished by unequalled simplicity, strength and accuracy, but directly he gets on to the subject of abstract psychology he is lost; his very language seems to become helpless. When he leaves the pa.s.sions of the heart for the pa.s.sions of the mind he becomes obscure, ungrammatical and false. Compare Irteniev, the hero of _Childhood and Youth_, with Nekhlindov in _Resurrection_.

The former is distinct, unforgettable, alive ... the latter a lifeless abstraction, a dreary megaphone. He cannot create human souls with anything like the success he achieves with human bodies.

We see this best of all in the case of Natasha, in _War and Peace_. She seems at the end of the book to have lost her soul in her body, and become a mere prolific she-animal, living solely for her children and husband. She has become divinely fleshly. "'We may run risks ourselves, but not for our children,'" she remarks to Pierre when he wishes to give away his property, echoing what Tolstoy's own wife said to him on a similar occasion.

Austerlitz, Borodino, the burning of Moscow, Napoleon--all pa.s.s forgotten as if written on sand, but Natasha remains, Natasha, the eternal mother, triumphantly waving "swaddling clothes, with a yellow stain instead of a green," the divine animal. The swallowing up of the human individual in the universal is Tolstoy's unvarying theme. Natures swallows up Uncle Yeroshka ("I die and--the gra.s.s grows"), child-bearing absorbs Natasha, sinful, destroying love swallows up Anna Karenina. She is all compact of love. Her words are poor: Tolstoy is always poor in dialogue. His excellence lies, as may have been guessed, in descriptions. One might almost say that his characters only speak because the mechanical conformation of their mouths admits of it.

What do we know, for instance, of Anna? What does she think about Children, People, Duty, Nature, Art, Life, Death and G.o.d? We don't know.

But, on the other hand, we do know exactly how her slender fingers taper at the end, what a round, polished neck she has, how her curls flutter on her neck and temples; every expression of her face, every movement of her body we do know.

He probes the human till he reaches the animal, and so, as in the case of Vronsky's mare, Frou-frou, he probes the animal till he reaches the human. He brings the likeness of G.o.d to the image of the beast.

There are in Tolstoy's books no heroes, no characters, no personalities ... and hence there is no tragedy, no catastrophe, no redeeming horror, no redeeming laughter. The princ.i.p.als are all clever, honourable, good, simple, nave or kindly, yet we never feel at home with them. There is always present that feeling with us that he lacks spiritual liberty, as Turgenev said. It is due entirely to his too great sense of the body, too little sense of the spirit.

X

TCHEHOV (1860-1904)

Tchehov is to Russian literature what de Maupa.s.sant is to French, but he has none of the ribaldry of the great Frenchman. His stories deal with the middle cla.s.ses, minor officials and the professional cla.s.ses.

Tolstoy looked upon him as a mere photographer, much in the same way that many Englishmen regard Galsworthy because of his amazing sense of detachment. But Tchehov has one quality not commonly found among photographers, and that is humour. Many of his stories are pathetic, but they are always lit up by a vein of gay drollery which adds to their subtlety and heightens the effect. It must always be remembered that he wrote at a period when Russia was in a peculiar state of stagnation. His work represents the reaction of flatness after a period of literary activity. Hence we are always coming up against words like "ennui,"

"greyness," and so on. Half the people seemed to have run to seed playing vint.

Turgenev painted the generation before, a generation that strove hard to evolve something out of life; Tchehov portrays a generation which had sunk back into torpor: the disease of Oblmovism had a firm grip of them.

He was born in South Russia, the son of a serf: luckily he was given a good education, finishing at the University of Moscow, where he studied medicine. During the cholera epidemics of 1892 he volunteered to stand at the head of a medical district, and became acquainted with diverse characters, all of whom stood him in good stead when he took to writing, which he did very early in life. He attracted attention from the first in his volume of short humorous sketches: as his life went on he undertook more and more complicated problems and increased year by year in artistry.

His great success lies in presenting the failures of human life, especially the failure of the educated man in the face of the all-pervading meanness of everyday life.

I will treat first of his dramas.

The Russians, it must be premised, go to the theatre to see what they would see off the stage: they are incurably realistic. They do not take a delight, as we do, in huge catastrophes: they like to see the trivial incidents of ordinary life reproduced with life-like accuracy on the stage.

He wrote in all eleven plays, five of which are serious: the remaining farces need not detain us. He discovered that life can be made interesting and dramatic with indulging in heroics. He is always human, and makes us feel moods and sensations over again which we have often felt before. He seems, in other words, to make his plays out of nothing, without having recourse to action or any extraordinary phenomena.

We are not introduced to men and women stripped of the masks which they wear in ordinary life: his characters behave exactly as they would off the stage, and betray themselves as people do by a phrase, a gesture, the humming of a tune and the smell of a flower.

In The _Seagull_ we are introduced to the family of Sorin, whose sister is a famous actress called Arkadina. Preparations have been made for some private theatricals written by Arkadina's son, Constantin. The chief part is to be played by Ina, the young daughter of a neighbour who is in love with Constantin, who is full of ideals about reforming the stage. A well-known writer, Trigorin, a man of about forty, is staying with Sorin at the time.

The play is acted: Arkadina labels it decadent; Constantin gets annoyed.

Ina after the performance is introduced to Trigorin. The daughter of an agent who has witnessed the performance (her name is Masha) confesses to a doctor visitor that she is in love with Constantin, and the curtain falls on Act I.

The second Act takes place in the same house. Constantin brings in a dead seagull, and lays it at Ina's feet as a symbol which she fails to understand.

Trigorin in the course of a conversation with her tells her what it feels like to be a famous author.

"'What is there so wonderful about it? Like a monomaniac, who is always thinking day and night of the moon, I am pursued by the one thought which I cannot get rid of, I must write, I must write, I must. I have scarcely finished a story when I must write a second, then a third, then a fourth. I write uninterruptedly, I cannot do otherwise. What is there so wonderful and splendid in this, I ask you? It is a cruel life. I get excited with you and all the time I am remembering that an unfinished story is waiting for me. I see a cloud which is like a piano, and I at once think that I must remember to say somewhere in the story that there is a cloud like a piano.

"'When I write it is pleasant, and it is nice to correct proofs: but as soon as the thing is published I cannot bear it, and I already see that it is not at all what I meant, that it is a mistake, that I should not have written it at all, and I am vexed and horribly depressed. The public reads it, and says: "Yes, pretty, full of talent, very nice, but how different from Tolstoy!" or "Yes, a fine thing, but how far behind _Fathers and Sons_: Turgenev is better." And so, until I die, it will always be "pretty and full of talent," never anything more: and when I die my friends as they pa.s.s my grave will say: "Here lies Trigorin; he was a good writer, but he did not write so well as Turgenev."'"

This reads like that very rare thing in Tchehov, a confession of the author himself.

However that may be, Ina replies that to her it is none the less a most wonderful gift that he possesses. For her part, for the joy of being an artist she would bear the hate of friends, want and disappointment.

Trigorin then notices the seagull and is driven to turn it into copy at once.

"'An idea has occurred to me,'" he says, "'for a short story. On the banks of a lake a young girl lives from her infancy. She loves the lake like a seagull, she is happy and free: unexpectedly a man comes and sees her and out of mere idleness kills her, just like this sea-gull.'"

That is the end of the second Act.

In the third Act Ina has fallen in love with Trigorin. Constantin out of jealousy has tried unsuccessfully to kill himself and challenged Trigorin to a duel, of which he takes no notice. After a quarrel with his mother, which is made up, Constantin is inspired to take up the threads of life again. We now discover that Trigorin has been and is Arkadina's lover. Ina tells the famous author that she is going to follow him to Moscow and they part on a note of pa.s.sion. Two years elapse.

In the fourth Act we find that Constantin has become famous: Ina has gone on the stage and failed. She has had a child (which died) by Trigorin: he has returned to Arkadina and deserted Ina, who has been thrown over by her parents too. She enters and tells her story, and Constantin declares that he still loves her in spite of all, but she is still in love with Trigorin. Constantin, hearing this, can bear up no longer, but shoots himself.

Such is the rather grim plot: the characterisation is well-nigh faultless, especially of Arkadina, the loving mother, who is quite unable to appreciate her son's talents, and of Trigorin, the weak, vain egoist, who is without a vestige of ill-nature or malice.

_The Cherry Garden_ was his last play and sounds a note of hopefulness which re-echoes through all his stories. Though the present may be black and bitter, Tchehov always looks to a future where ideals shall once more reign.

In the first Act we see the return of a lady who is heavily burdened with debts to her estate in South Russia. It is the month of May and the cherry orchard is in full blossom. We get the exact atmosphere of the arrival of people from a journey and the return of a family to a home from which it has long been absent.

The lady, Ranievskaia, is a child in financial matters and, Micawber-like, imagines that someone or something will turn up to extricate her out of her difficulties. A merchant neighbour of singular astuteness propounds a solution. If they cut down the cherry-trees and let the land for villa holdings they will ensure an income of two thousand five hundred pounds a year at least. They regard this idea as quite out of the question. They refuse to listen to such a ridiculous suggestion. They revert to their Micawber-like att.i.tude and wait for an aunt to die and leave them a legacy and something of a like nature.

In the third Act we arrive at the day of the auction when their house and property are to be sold over their heads. Nevertheless they are holding a dance in spite of it. The merchant enters and announces that he has bought the cherry orchard.

In the last Act we see them leaving their house for ever; the trees are already being cut down and the house is going to make room for neat suburban villas. The pathos and naturalness of this Act are extraordinary. Every character in the play lives. It is historical and at the same time symbolical, because it shows us why the landed gentry in Russia has ceased to have any importance and how these unpractical, amiable people must go under when faced by energetic, rich, self-made men. The play seems to be about nothing and yet every casual remark has always a definite purpose.

_Three Sisters_ represents the intense monotony of provincial life, relieved momentarily by a pa.s.sing flash, and then rendered doubly grey by the disappearance of the flash. A regiment of artillery comes to the garrison of a small town. One of the three sisters, Masha, has married a schoolmaster: the two others, Irina and Olga, are living with their brother, who is a professor. Irina is in the telegraph office, Olga teaches. They live for one thing only, to get away and settle in Moscow.

They only remain on Masha's account. Masha's husband is an exceedingly tedious schoolmaster, who is always reciting tags of Latin. Once his wife thought him the cleverest man in the world, now she thinks of him as the kindest but most tedious.

When the play begins we hear of a new commander appointed to the battery. His name is Vershinin and he is married to a half-mad woman.

Other officers are Baron Tuzenbach and Major Soleny. The former is in love with Irina, who is willing to marry him but does not love him.

Masha falls pa.s.sionately in love with Vershinin. The Major is jealous of Tuzenbach. Suddenly the battery is transferred to some remote corner of the country. Soleny challenges the Baron and kills him. The three sisters are left alone, Vershinin bidding a pa.s.sionate farewell to Masha, who does not even trouble to hide her grief from her husband. He in a most pathetic way tries to console her: Ina does not care even when she is told of the death of the Baron ... and so the sisters are left to go on working in their misery, deprived even of the flash which promised to lend some colour to their existence. It is, of course, impossible to deny that these plays are laden with gloom, but it is the darkness of the last hour before the dawn. Tchehov never despairs: he has an invincible trust in the coming day. He shows us how difficult life is, that there is nothing to be done but to continue working as cheerfully as we may, but in doing so he fulfilled the first condition of all great writing: he never failed to interest, and consequently his plays are, in spite of their sombreness, a never-failing fount of inspiration and aesthetic delight.

As a short story-writer he has certainly no equal in Russia and few in any other country.

Owing to the indefatigability of Mrs Constance Garnett we now possess eight volumes, all containing priceless cameos of Russian life, ranging through the humorous, the bizarre, the mystic, the unconventional and lawless to the pathetic, poignant and dramatic.

He is unflinching in his realism, but pa.s.sionately devoted to his search for truth and full of a poet's sensitiveness to beauty. He is softer, warmer, altogether kindlier than Maupa.s.sant. Even the odious characters are seen through the eyes of a kindly creator who never descends to hardness or bitterness. Indeed this faculty of refraining from judging others is almost the most peculiar feature of Russian writers taken as a whole. They are many degrees nearer the Kingdom of Heaven than any other Christian country, if this virtue is really so valuable as the New Testament insists. There is nothing cynical in Tchehov's melancholy. He accepts the world with all its glaring, tangled skein of inconsequences and wickedness and foolishness and humorously transcribes what he sees in a mood of cool, scientific pa.s.sivity blending with the sensibility of a sweet, wholesome, responsive nature. Unlike Dostoievsky, he seldom identifies himself with his unfortunate characters.

The first story in the series edited by Mrs Garnett is _The Darling_, which treats of a woman who shares her first husband's anxiety about his theatre; throws herself into the interests of the timber trade in which her second husband works; under the influence of her third begins to regard the campaign against the foot and mouth disease as the most important matter in the world and is finally left engrossed in grammatical questions and the interests of the little schoolboy in the big cap.

She devotes herself with her whole being in each case to the man and the cause he represents. And Tolstoy in his criticism thinks that Tchehov set out to scoff at her inconstancy. Yet do we laugh at Dryden's frequent change of front? Is it not a sign of life and growth to throw oneself heart and soul into whatever pursuit may be immediately to one's hand? Certainly she loves absurd people, but love is sacred whatever the object of the affection. "He, like Balaam," says Tolstoy, "intended to curse, but the G.o.d of poetry forbade him, and commanded him to bless.

And he did bless, and unconsciously clothed this sweet creature in such an exquisite radiance that she will always remain a type of what a woman can be in order to be happy herself, and to make the happiness of those with whom destiny throws her."

But I do not feel convinced in my mind that Tchehov meant Olenka to excite our disgust or careless laughter. Where she loves there she loves whole-heartedly: her life is a blank, ready to take any impress, nor does she seek to erase any one of them until it is irrevocably removed from her. There are innumerable little touches deftly sketched in which make us feel not the ridiculousness or emptiness of the Darling, but rather love her for her sensibility and power of loving.

The main attraction of Tchehov for normal English readers is the shrewd psychology and the quick lightning flashes of nimble wit with which the text is strewn. As with his plays, so in his tales there is practically no plot. Pa.s.sions spin the plot and mere catastrophic incident is not required.